Posts Tagged ‘texting’

Risk, creeping catastrophics, fraud, obesity, pachydermodactyly, and more

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Risk RoundupCavalcade of Risk #159 – Early Edition is posted at My Wealth Builder. We’d like to highlight Jason Shafrin’s post as particularly noteworthy for our readers: Healthcare Costs to Rise by over 7 percent in 2013.
Creeping catastrophics – Our colleague Mark Walls has a good article in Business Insurance on Creeping Catastrophic Claims – How to Spot Them and Stop Them. “These claims start out like any other case, usually with a back, knee or shoulder injury. However, because of a series of events, they end up costing the employer hundreds of thousands of dollars. These developmental claims share many common characteristics that, if identified and addressed in a timely manner, can prevent significant adverse development of the claims.”
Big bucks fraud – John D’Alusio unpacks the AIG debacle and explains how it hurts us all in his post Gaming the Workers Comp System at Workerscompensation.com.
Ergonomics of obesity – What does obesity look like to a workplace ergonomist? “Increased obesity in the workplace means more arthritis, larger waist circumferences, additional work limitations, compromised grip strength, decreased lower limb mobility and medical risks. Obese employees might be more vulnerable to falls and their manual material handling ability may be compromised. Obesity also can impact self-esteem, motivation, absenteeism, presenteeism, premature mortality and more.” More at Ergonomic Strategies for Managing Obesity in the Workplace
Case Law – The Tennessee Supreme Court found for an employer in a statute of limitations case involving PTSD. The employer argued that the statute of limitations clock began ticking when the event that caused the trauma occurred (viewing the bodies of two co-workers killed on the job), but the court found that the statute of limitations does not begin to run until an employee discovers the injury and, in this case, the employee did not know he had PTSD until some time after the workplace deaths occurred.
DOL Transparency – In 2011, the Department of Labor proposed a rule strengthening safety provisions for children under age 15 who work on farms. The rule had a parental exemption so that kids could still work on family farms. Apparently, industry pressure led DOL to withdraw the rule. DOL also removed the proposed rule from its website and Celeste Monforton posts that Government transparency groups are asking the Labor Dept to restore info scrubbed from website.
Texting while driving – Steve Yahn of Risk & Insurance looks at how Companies Fight Against Texting and Driving. He notes, “Gavejian and other experts who work with companies to develop cell phone and texting policies said that businesses need to first assess how technology is used in their workplace on a daily basis.”
Food processing hazard – A new report describes two cases of poultry workers who developed chronically swollen knuckles, the hallmark sign of a rare skin condition known as pachydermodactyly: Hand deformities turn up in poultry workers, report finds.
Other noteworthy news

Reckless, Negligent, Compensable

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Matt Mitchell was an Illinois state trooper. On November 23, 2007, he was bombing along Interstate 64 at 126 miles per hour, on his way to an accident scene. He was chatting with his girlfriend and sending text messages. The road was somewhat clogged with holiday travelers. His speeding was not necessary, as help had already arrived at the accident scene. The distracted trooper crossed over the median and hit a car head on. Two sisters, Kelli and Jessica Uhl, were killed instantly. Two other occupants of the car were injured. Trooper Mitchell suffered severe leg injuries.
Speeding for no reason. Texting and talking unrelated to his job. Reckless. Negligent. And, it appears, compensable.
Mitchell pleaded guilty to reckless homicide and reckless driving and was sentenced to 30 months probation. He resigned his position with the state police. He has filed a claim for workers comp benefits, which is likely to be awarded because Mitchell was in the course and scope of employment. In the stipulation during a civil suit filed by the parents of the Uhl sisters, the Illinois attorney general agreed that, despite the criminal negligence, Mitchell was acting in his capacity as a state trooper when the accident occurred. Yes, the speeding was gratuitous, the texting irresponsible, the girl friend chats unrelated to work. But Mitchell was heading to the scene of an accident. He was a jerk and a menace, but he was working.
On the Hook
Illinois taxpayers face an interesting double jeopardy. They are on the hook for the deaths of the Uhl sisters. And they will soon be on the hook for Mitchell’s loss of function payments and possibly for permanent total benefits.
It’s worth noting that just three days after pleading guilty to the criminal charges, Mitchell testified in a claims hearing that he was not responsible for the crash.
If Mitchell had not been heading for an accident scene, if he was speeding simply because he wore a uniform that allowed him to get away with it, perhaps his claim would be denied under the concept of “wilful intent.” We are reminded once again of comp’s cornerstone principle of “no fault.” There’s plenty of fault in this sorry saga, but it does not – alas, it cannot – matter one bit.

Cavalcade of Risk #111 and items that hit our radar this week

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Nancy Germond hosts this week’s Cavalcade of Risk #111. Make sure you click her “just for fun” video for a display of unusual talent! Of course, her links to more serious risk-related posts are fun too, although in a slightly more nerdy way ;-)
Here are a few other links to news items that hit our radar:

Cavalcade of Risk and an assortment of workers’ comp news briefs

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

It’s Cavalcade of Risk day – visit the bi-weekly roundup of posts about risk, graciously hosted this week at Wenchy’s Place – check out this week’s edition and wish the hostess a happy birthday while there.
In other workers’ comp-related news:
Medical costs and WC – Joe Paduda explains why you should expect work comp medical costs to be heading up over at Managed Care Matters. He points to one of the primary problems: “Misaligned incentives for work comp managed care programs, and payers’ increased reliance on managed care program revenue and profits.”
Moving violationsU.S. bans truckers, bus drivers from texting. The National Safety Council estimates that at least 1.6 million crashes are caused each year by drivers using cell phones and texting. The NSC has called for a total ban all cell phone use and texting while driving. Here’s a good site to bookmark since cell phone and texting laws have been changing frequently in response to safety reports: State cell phone and texting while driving laws. It’s maintained by the Governors Highway Safety Association.
More on marijuana – Should pot provided as a work comp medical benefit? Roberto Ceniceros talks about a California
marijuana ruling
at Comp Time. Meanwhile, the CA Supreme Court nixed limits on medical marijuana and the Los Angeles City Council voted to close hundreds of dispensaries that have sprung up.
Global risk – Before you open that branch office in Somalia, you may want to take a look at Emily Holbrook’s posting on Risk Monitor: the most hazardous countries for business.
P/C Forecast – What’s in store for the property-casualty industry in 2010? Ernst & Young offer a 2010 U.S. industry outlook. (PDF)
Comp Case Law Over at LexisNexis WC Law Blog, Larson’s Case Law Developments offers their picks for The Top 10 Workers’ Compensation Cases of 2009.
Union censusWorkplace Prof Blog reports on a Department of Labor report which shows that the union density rate was essentially unchanged in 2009 – 12.3% vs 12.4% in 2008. Among private sector employees, the rate dropped to 7.2% from the 2008 rate of 7.6%. Also of note from the report: “The data also show the median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary union members were $908 per week, compared to $710 for workers not represented by unions. Union members earn 28 percent more than their non-union counterparts.”
Quickies

Instant Message, Instant Catastrophe

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Robert Sanchez operated Metrolink trains in the Los Angeles area. By all accounts, he was a personable fellow. You might say, nice to a fault. He occasionally invited young passengers to take control of the train. He stayed in touch with train enthusiasts and friends via texting. Cool!
On September 12, 2008, he was operating a train near the end of an 11 hour shift. He was also sending and receiving text messages – 57 in all while on duty that day. Sanchez missed a red light signal and plowed without braking into a freight train heading in the opposite direction on the same track. Twenty five people died (Sanchez included); 135 were injured, many critically. For dozens of the survivors, life will never be the same. (You can attach faces to the numbers here.)
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued its final report. While criticizing the long shifts and the lack of automatic crash controls, the board has placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the late Mr. Sanchez. Distracted by his texting activity, he failed to notice yellow and red signals, which should have alerted him to trouble ahead. As one board member put it, “his head was not in the game.” That’s an odd but apt metaphor for a tragedy on this scale, with losses totalling about $12 million, not to mention the random destruction of human life.
Distractions
We live in a world where distraction is deeply embedded in our way of life. As the poet T.S. Eliot put it in his poem “Burnt Norton,” we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” From moment to moment, one thing or another tempts us. Don’t like the music? Change the station. Wondering what a friend is up to? Fire off a text. No need to be bored when there are so many ways to engage our flighty minds. It’s deceptively easy to multi-task your way out of the doldrums. It worked for Sanchez – up to a very specific point in time.
Eliot’s poem ends with what might be an epitaph for the victims of this terrible incident, Sanchez included, who surely never intended any harm:
Ridiculous the sad waste time
stretching before and after.
Ridiculous and sad, indeed.

Thumbs Down on New York Texting Ban?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

As a follow up to Julie Ferguson’s gruesome imagery from Monday’s blog, we find Clyde Haberman’s entertaining piece in the New York Times about the state’s new statute outlawing texting. As of November 1, it will be illegal for anyone to drive and text in the Empire State. Haberman goes on to write:

If any law may be described as a no-brainer, this one is it. You have to be certifiable to think that you can stare at a small screen and thumb-type on a tiny keyboard for five or six seconds while going 65 miles an hour, and not be a potential threat to everyone in your path. In the opinion of many safety experts, self-deluding multitaskers have had their way long enough. It’s time for some multi-tsking to rein them in.

Bravo, Clyde! But Haberman goes on to say that the new law is pretty toothless. “It doesn’t throw the book at texters so much as it tosses a few pages in their direction.” (Shades of Keith Olbermann?)
The problem is in enforcement. The new statute will only receive “secondary” enforcement, which means that a fine may be imposed only if the police find some other violation, such as speeding or running a red light. Beyond that, the maximum penalty is only $150. That’s chump change for the high rolling multi-taskers who clog New York’s multitudinous arteries.
Live Free and Die?
Haberman interviews Judith Lee Stone, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a Washington lobbying group. She says “secondary enforcement is not OK, and there’s no reason for it.”
The good folks in New York like to creep up on enforcement. When they first initiated a seat belt law, they began with secondary enforcement and eventually moved to primary status. All states now require seatbelts, with the notable exception of New Hampshire, which exempts adults over 18 from the mandate.
“It must be that “Live Free or Die” spirit,” Haberman quips.
To which Stone responds, “Live free and die, I’d say.”
The low budget ($20,000) video was produced by the Chief Constable of the tiny town of Gwent in SE Wales UK. The video has become a You-Tube sensation. The Insider humbly suggests that New York legislators check it out and then revisit the enforcement section of the new law. No one wants to suffer injury or even death just because some twit can’t wait to for the proper time to communicate something that, in the scheme of things, most certainly can wait.

Brutal, graphic video aimed at teens: don’t text while driving

Monday, August 31st, 2009

There’s been quite a lot of media coverage on the high risk of texting while driving and several states are lining up to issue bans or restrictions on the practice. We recently featured a texting while driving game that let’s you get a rough gauge of how you’d fare while texting at the wheel. But this simulator really soft pedals things in comparison to the approach that some countries are taking in getting the message out. Nothing that we’ve seen or read here in the U.S. has the raw, visceral power that a recent British public service announcement aimed at teens.
Before watching, please be warned that this video is very graphic.

There’s no disputing the danger that texting while driving poses – the studies are adding up. One of the more recent is a study by the VirginiaTech Transportation Institute, which found that texting truck drivers were 23 times more at risk of a crash or near crash event than nondistracted drivers. But there has been some debate about the effectiveness of shock advertising as an awareness and prevention tactic – some see them as highly effective, while other think that viewers tend to tune them out. This is an issue that came up about two years ago when Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board released a series of graphic public service announcements designed to highlight worker safety.
As for the subject of this ad – currently, 18 states ban texting for all drivers. The Governors’ Highway Safety Association maintains and updates a handy chart of state cell phone and texting laws – check back often, as this is an issue on several state legislative dockets.

Texting and Driving: Dying to Communicate

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Aiden Quinn is 24 years old. He drives a trolley for the Mass Bay Transit Authority (MBTA or T) in Boston. He has a mediocre driving record, with three speeding violations (while operating a motor vehicle). Last week he was driving a trolley underground between Park Street and Government Center. He was texting his girlfriend, when he ran a red light and crashed into another trolley stopped in front of him. Over 40 people were injured, including Quinn. The T was shut down for hours.
Quinn has been fired – no surprise – and the T has now issued a policy prohibiting drivers from carrying cell phones. (I’m sure that made the other drivers real happy with their former colleague.) The 40 injured passengers are going to have numerous avenues for lawsuits, including: negligent hiring/negligent entrustment (should Quinn have been operating the trolley in the first place?); and negligent policies (they only prohibited cell phone use after the accident). We can assume that the T will settle as quickly as possible. This case is a real loser.
The larger policy implications are intriguing. It is safe to assume that any employee in the course and scope of employment who tries to text while driving is opening a huge liability for the employer. Texting is even more dangerous than talking on a cell phone: after all, you have to look at the screen to read a message and at the key board to reply.
[Aside: my teenage daughter assures me that her friends can text behind their backs without looking at the keyboard. This might work in class, but not very well on the road: “Look Ma, no hands on the wheel!”]
[Second aside: speaking of Ma, for a truly appalling (YouTube) video of a teenager who texts over 5,000 times a month, often while driving, check this out. If you can explain the passive “what can you do?” attitude of the mother, please explain via our comment section.]
Policy Conundrum
Employers are caught in a bind: they are virtually compelled to issue policies limiting cell phone use and texting while driving, even while they recognize that some of their best and most productive employees are multi-taskers who routinely operate this way.
Which brings us to the sad story of Phyllis Jen, a talented internal medicine specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Jen was driving her 2007 Toyota Prius when she drifted over the center lane at 6 pm (in full daylight). She crashed into another vehicle and was killed.
Police say it did not appear speed or alcohol played a role in the crash, but they were investigating whether Jen was using her Blackberry. Jen was famous for always being available, always willing to go the extra mile. Alas, she has abruptly and tragically run out of miles to go.
As companies struggle to integrate new technologies into safety procedures and as public officials struggle with whole new categories of risk, one thing is certain: the ubiquitous cell phone and related texting have taken a firm hold in our professional and personal lives. We just cannot seem to function without them. The problem is, in making ourselves available 24/7, we put our own lives and the lives of strangers at risk. Sure, we have important things to communicate. But on the scale of life itself, virtually all of these communications can and should be put off until time and circumstances allow. We might be dying to communicate with a colleague or friend, but it’s certainly not worth dying for.

Texting can be lethal

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

With the recent focus on the economic meltdown and the pending election, you might have missed the story about the likely cause of the horrific California train crash that killed 25 people last month and injured 135 others. Almost immediately, authorities knew that the accident was the result of human error – the driver had failed to stop at a stop sign. But what didn’t surface until later is that the driver was text messaging just seconds before the crash:

“Robert Sanchez, the driver of a Los Angeles Metrolink commuter train that crashed head-on with a freight locomotive, may have been text messaging seconds before the fatal crash, according to subpoenaed reports from Verizon Wireless. Records show the driver had received a text at 4:21.03 p.m. and sent a text at 4:22.01 p.m. The two trains crashed seconds later at 4:22.23 p.m.
Records also showed that during his time operating the train, the engineer received seven text messages and sent five. Earlier in the day, during a two-hour morning shift, the engineer’s cell phone received 21 text messages and sent 24 text messages.”

The driver’s texting was in violation of the National Transportation Safety Board’s policy banning all use of phones while operating a train. As any employer knows, having a policy and enforcing it can be two separate matters, in this case with tragic results.
In most states, texting while driving is still a legal practice. While several states are looking at potential laws to ban the practice, only a handful of states currently have such laws on the books – the state of California and the city of Chicago have recently both banned the practice. A recent survey of 1500 drivers by Nationwide Insurance revealed that about 20% of drivers are texting while behind the wheel – and that number may reach as high as 66% when isolating drivers aged 18 to 24.
Regardless of state law, employers should enact safety policies that encompass mobile devices. Tom Starner deals with safety and other issues related to emerging technology in Human Resource Executive Online article Calling for Enforcement. And if the human cost alone isn’t enough to catch an employer’s attention, Starner cites a number of litigated cases with multi-million dollar settlements related to fatalities caused by employees who were using mobile devices. He quotes Portland, Ore. attorney Nancy M. Cooper:

“As those latest examples show, it’s becoming increasingly important for employers to implement effective cell-phone-use policies, both to limit liability and improve safety,” Cooper says. “It doesn’t matter if a call is being made during regular office hours or not; what matters is that the call [or text messaging] is work related. Employers may be found liable for any damages caused by an employee acting within the scope of his or her employment.”

Motor vehicle related workplace injuries are among the most common, and are also one of the leading causes of workplace death. We’ve talked about he need for diligent risk management policies and procedures for employees who drive – it’s a good time for employers to update policies to specifically address text messaging.